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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/25771564">recollection (of a life unseen)</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/panaceaa/pseuds/pana'>pana (panaceaa)</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Persona 5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Character Study, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Persona 5: The Royal Spoilers, based on the deleted rehab scene</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-05 06:34:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,746</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/25771564</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/panaceaa/pseuds/pana</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Goro doesn’t have any particular destination in mind. Not really. In fact, he’s not really thinking at all, is simply taking in the world for the first time in a little under a month. </p><p>He’s wearing his school uniform. He debated wearing something a little more unassuming, but he was always one to challenge fate. If he’s being perfectly honest, it’s a little eerie how almost nobody seems to pay attention to him. It’s not...unpleasant, just strange. </p><p>Makes it feel as if he really isn’t alive after all.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Akechi Goro/Amamiya Ren, Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>186</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>recollection (of a life unseen)</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The last thing that Goro <em>really</em> remembers, is the feeling of desperation.</p><p>It’s a disgusting feeling really. It claws at his insides like a pathetic little creature, twisting and crying out for <em>something</em>. Fitting really that he doesn’t even know what the fuck he even wanted. Acceptance? Shido’s respect so everything Goro did for that asshole wouldn’t be for nothing. For Joker to stop looking at him like he still-</p><p>His mind, of course, goes a little hazy after that. A side effect of making himself go psychotic.</p><p>And well, he supposes the reason never really did matter in the end. What does matter is the little bits and pieces of what comes after that stab themselves into his memory with all the grace and subtlety of a butcher knife. Couldn’t forget them if he tried, even if they make him feel more like an outsider in his own head.</p><p>The first of them, is the truth.</p><p>Shido always thought he was expendable. He doesn’t know why he’s so surprised by that fact. It does <em>hurt</em> though, knowing that his plan was doomed to fail from the very beginning. He’d only ever been fooling himself.</p><p>Second, is his choice.</p><p>There’s a gun in his hands and another looking him in the face, and standing there frozen is Joker, face white with horror. That’s the last he sees of him before the bulkhead door slams down between them. It was the obvious decision, really. He sacrifices himself for Akira and his friends, because well, before he dies he might as well do <em>one</em> good thing. Not that it makes up for anything.</p><p>Third, is the end.</p><p>Does he regret the way things ended up? Maybe. But before he dies he doesn’t really think much about regrets and things he could have done differently. Instead, he thinks of Akira standing there on the other side of that wall. How utterly fitting it was that once again they’re separated by a wall of Goro’s own choices. Maybe if they’d only met each other sooner-</p><p>But that’s neither here nor there. What they have now is a promise, one that Akira reminds him of through the unforgiving metal of the bulkhead door.</p><p>And Akira Kurusu is an <em>idiot</em>. A complete and utter imbecile. Goro tried to kill him <em>twice</em>, and yet he’s still holding onto that stupid glove. As if he actually <em>cares</em>, as if Goro has actually managed to make himself important to someone as maddeningly perfect as Akira fucking Kurusu.</p><p>It shouldn’t make his heart react the way that it does.</p><p>It’s a stupid inane reaction to have, especially while he’s stuck staring down a gun held by a cognition of himself. But it’s not as if he’s ever feared death as much as he probably should have. The shot goes off, and then-</p><p>And then, <em>nothing</em>.</p><p>There are...certain things that stand out to him, but they’re blurred around the edges and they bleed into each other to the point he can no longer tell what’s real and what isn’t.</p><p>He faintly recalls waking up in a field somewhere. Or maybe it was a park? A garden in front of a building maybe? Wherever it was had these ugly white flowers that filled his vision, and there was this smug looking beetle sitting on one right in front of his nose. He killed it, of course.</p><p>Next thing he knows he’s unlocking the door of his apartment with no memory of getting there. He stumbles inside, and without even changing out of his uniform he collapses in his bed and falls asleep.</p><p>He thinks he sleeps for a long time.</p><p>As per usual, his sleep is plagued by constant and unrelenting nightmares. Some of them he can’t remember, but when he wakes up he’s drenched in sweat and terrified. But the worst ones are the ones that he remembers. The ones he remembers because he lived through them. His mother, blood pooling on the floor from the gashes across her wrists. Kurusu’s steel gray eyes boring into his seconds before he blows his brains out. Wakaba Isshiki’s shadow, begging for her life before he silenced her with a shot through the head.</p><p>One time he wakes to see his mother sitting at his kitchen table. She looks the way she used to look on her good days. Her gentle smile serving as a promise bound into the root of his heart, telling him that things would be better one day. That the worst days were behind them and she’d be happy everyday like he wanted her to be. Her hair would glow under the morning sunlight shining through their window, her white nightgown bunched up around her ankles, looking like an angel straight out of one of his storybooks.</p><p>When she holds him to her chest she whispers, “It’s not your fault,” into his hair. He wants to ask her what she’s talking about, but then he wakes up alone in his apartment only to realize that that too had been a dream.</p><p>He thinks he cries for a while after that.</p><p>Yet, strangely enough, afterwards his dreams get better.</p><p>Some of them are of his childhood, the few happy memories that he has to hold onto. Others are terribly mundane, like getting sushi with Sae or that one dream he has where both Loki and Robin Hood are his dogs and they bark and whine for his attention.</p><p>But mostly, he dreams of Akira.</p><p>Sometimes they’re passionate and intense in a way that leads to him waking up panting and unbearably hard.</p><p>Other times they’ll explore the metaverse together, killing shadows in perfect synchronization. They almost always lock eyes afterwards and it’s as thrilling as he remembers it being, leaving him breathless in an entirely different way.</p><p>But most of the time Akira’s simply <em>there</em>. Sometimes they’ll play chess in that dingy little attack he calls home. They take walks, discuss cases, and Goro always sits in his favorite spot when they have coffee together at Leblanc.</p><p>Most of the time they have conversations about aimless things that Goro can’t remember when he wakes up. But there are a few that he remembers.</p><p>During one such case they’re walking through a park together. The surroundings aren’t entirely familiar to him, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is how perfect Akira always seems to look. Physically attractiveness was a given, but there was something in his quiet mannerisms and the way he perceived the world around him that was simply enthralling.</p><p>“I would have helped you if you asked,” Akira tells him, and Goro can’t remember if they’d been having a conversation or if the words are completely unprompted.</p><p>“I didn’t ask for your help.”</p><p>Despite the simplicity of his words, Akira smiles at him knowingly. He offers a small shrug.</p><p>“That doesn’t mean you didn’t need it.”</p><p>And that particular dream sticks with him for a while.</p><p>Deep down, Goro is intrinsically aware that these are all dreams. They can’t be real. And yet, he finds himself constantly caught between them. One running into the next. Constant exhaustion clouding all other thoughts and needs.</p><p>That is until one day when he just- <em>wakes up</em>.</p><p>***</p><p>His apartment is a mess.</p><p>That’s the very first thing Goro Akechi’s mind registers.</p><p>What little food he had stored in his apartment looks to be tossed around every available surface, emptied of their contents. It’s as if an animal got into his apartment and tore the place apart, or more likely, a teenager whose body had been trying to sustain itself even through unconsciousness in a desperate attempt to keep itself alive.</p><p>His head is absolutely pounding and he still feels a bit out of it, but he gathers enough of his wits about him to look around for his phone. It’s dead, rather unsurprisingly. He plugs it into the charger and leaves it alone in favor of opening up his laptop.</p><p>It’s there that he learns he’s trapped himself in his small apartment for just under a month.</p><p>He feels a little bit numb as he finally checks his phone, wondering how the hell he hasn’t been murdered yet. There’s several missed calls from Shido on the day that he presumably went...<em>missing</em>. But then after that, nothing.</p><p>The locks on his front door are undisturbed, and after a quick search on the internet he figures out why.</p><p>Turns out that Masayoshi Shido had a change of heart after all. There’s very little media attention on the matter, which is...concerning. But considering how quickly his calls stopped Goro would guess that the Phantom Thieves sent their calling card the very day after he asked them to.</p><p>Akira Kurusu had kept his end of their deal.</p><p>He knows he should be pleased at that fact, but instead his heart just hurts in that annoying little way it tends to at the thought of Akira.</p><p>That aside, things get a little bit more worrisome when he decides to search up his own name.</p><p>Despite his vanishing from the world for the greater part of a month, it seems that nobody is talking about him. No one is looking. All articles with his name are dated from nearly a month ago.</p><p>It’s then that it fully dawns on him.</p><p>Anyone who matters thinks he’s dead. He <em>should</em> be dead.</p><p>Maybe he actually is.</p><p>He considers that possibility for a while.</p><p>At one point he leans his head against the window and watches what looks like blood rain from the sky. He briefly considers the possibility that he actually is dead and this is just his personal hell. Stuck in his one bedroom apartment where everything he ever did was useless, and he tried to kill the only person he ever cared about not once, but twice, for absolutely nothing. And now he has to live with that knowledge for the rest of eternity.</p><p>But the world goes back to normal, and it slowly dawns on Goro that he’s being pathetic and sitting around his apartment doing nothing is helping absolutely no one.</p><p>He’s still not entirely sure if he’s even alive. But well, if he is dead and this is hell then he supposes he can humor it. Only because there’s nothing better to do, of course.</p><p>And so, on December 24th, Goro Akechi decides to go for a walk.</p><p>***</p><p>He doesn’t have any particular destination in mind. Not really. In fact, he’s not really thinking at all, is simply taking in the world for the first time in a little under a month.</p><p>He’s wearing his school uniform. He debated wearing something a little more unassuming, but he was always one to challenge fate. If he’s being perfectly honest, it’s a little eerie how almost nobody seems to pay attention to him. It’s not...unpleasant, just strange. Makes it feel as if he really isn’t alive after all.</p><p>When he gets on the train he does manage to catch a few curious stares, but no one approaches him. And it’s only then that he finally grows bored of weighing people’s reactions to him, and instead finds himself once again thinking about Akira.</p><p>Akira who was the one person who had seen who he was. Who had understood him at his most base, saw the monster that lied behind the false smiles and yet never looked at him any differently. Who instead looked at him like he was important. Like he was <em>worth</em> something. And while Goro had originally blamed that on his success in tricking him into believing the lie that was his Detective Prince facade, he’s only now fully realizing that he himself had been the only one who was fooled. Akira had known he would betray him the entire time, and yet...</p><p>And yet, he still <em>cared</em>.</p><p>Goro did absolutely nothing to deserve that kind of devotion. But maybe...he could. Be worth something, that is.</p><p>It’s not something he ever really considered before. But perhaps it wasn’t too late to try. For him.</p><p>It’s on that particular thought that Goro exits the train station and finally registers exactly where he ended up. Something nostalgic tugs at his memory, faint recollection from what was a small lifetime ago. He recognizes this street. But he hadn’t been here since he was much smaller, when he was with...</p><p>...With his mother.</p><p>Yeah, he knows where he is.</p><p>He follows the sidewalk to a fairly ordinary building nestled in between two larger houses. It’s already pretty late, the sun having set some time ago, but Goro’s pretty sure he remembers this particular Rehabilitation Center being open late into the evening.</p><p>When he gets to the entrance he hesitates, unsure if he really wants to do this. It had always been true that he wasn’t the best at admitting he might need help. He’d always been proud of his independence, and asking for help always felt like admitting a weakness.</p><p>
  <em>“That doesn’t mean you didn’t need it.”</em>
</p><p>It’s with that little reminder from his own traitor of a subconscious that Goro straightens his shirt collar out of habit and walks through the door.</p><p>A woman behind the desk looks up at him when he enters the building. The place itself is familiar, practically unchanged even after all these years. If he focuses enough he can almost remember what it felt like to be here all that time ago. Can almost remember the shape of his mother’s smile and the feel of her hand in his.</p><p>“Name?” The woman behind the desk asks him as he approaches.</p><p>“I...don’t have an appointment.”</p><p>She nods as if she understands. “And your name?” She asks again, typing something into the system.</p><p>“Goro Akechi.”</p><p>“And what brings you in today?”</p><p>And so, he tells her.</p><p>He keeps out most of the details of course, anything incriminating also gets filtered out for now. But he tells her about how he came here with his mother when he was a child. About how she killed herself and how he was tossed from foster home to foster home. Tells her all about the events of his past that ultimately made him who he is today.</p><p>And...he admits to her that he thinks he needs help. That he...<em>wants</em> help.</p><p>She nods along the entire time he talks, and in the end her eyes look a bit glassy but he pretends not to notice. After typing a few last things into the system, she steps out from behind the desk and gestures for him to follow her.</p><p>“Welcome back, Akechi-kun” she tells him with a gentle smile as he begins to follow. “I think you’re really going to like it here.”</p><p>And-</p><p>
  <em>That’s when the world shifts.</em>
</p><p>***</p><p>Nearly two months later, it’s in the middle of the afternoon.</p><p>The sunlight seeps through the window, alighting the room in a bright and comforting glow.</p><p>Goro stares down at the timeline he’s been working on. Makes a quick edit on one date he’d previously left blank. The past months have blurred together in his mind, two timelines fighting to take precedent over the other. He remembers talking to his therapist and cleaning the front of the Rehab on the same day that he also remembers traversing the palace of Akira’s counselor before retiring with him to the Jazz Club later that evening. Piecing together all his memories into a cohesive sequence of events has taken him a while because thinking about it too long has the unpleasant side effect of giving him a headache. But he <em>remembers</em>. He knows that both timelines are real in different ways.</p><p>Down at the bottom there’s one date he has circled multiple times. <em>March 19th</em>. And under that he’s written two things: <em>Shibuya Station, 2pm</em>.</p><p>This one isn’t a memory, but instead a reminder.</p><p>The staff has, of course, already been informed. They were understanding and approved it without even the slightest argument. He owes them a lot, but he feels as if his debt here has been mostly repaid. Feels more at peace with himself than he has for a very long time.</p><p>He knows what he has to do now. Has been writing names and collecting information on all of Shido’s inner circle, and now it was almost time for him to put it to use.</p><p>But first, there’s one person he needs to see.</p><p>He has a promise to keep after all.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Thank you for reading! All comments/criticisms are welcome!</p><p>You can find me on Twitter~ @pana_pancake</p></blockquote></div></div>
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